Every day, amongst the memes and snippets of video interviews the algorithms living in our phones throw us, we are a witness to performance art happening all around the world. Whether it’s Yoann Bourgeois’ captivating trampoline-based rumination on the journey of life, or the overtly feminist “Dancing to Voicemails from My Ex” trend, anything that can tell a compelling story in a thirty-second TikTok video is an immediate commodity.
This reality has also transformed the way visual art is experienced. Multimedia installation projects like Van Gogh Alive and the multisensory Frida Kahlo: Life of an Icon are mainstays for modern-day arts festivals and a key component of a curator’s toolkit, making art accessible, experiential and – well – Instagrammable.
[The dancers'] individual styles of movement become their identity and the heart of the work – connection – comes to the forefront.
The origins of performance art, however, date back to the early 1900s – in the then avant-garde movement and world of cabaret – through the nihilistic Dada movement, to the ’70s, where it became a medium for political retaliation within the feminist and anti-war movements.
The form has historically capitalised on the value of shock and outrage, but almost always builds on an intended interaction with an audience. From Carolee Schneemann rolling people through raw meat to Marina Abromovic’s silent conversation with strangers, The Artist Is Present (2010), performance art has always been live, memorable, experimental, invaluable (ie. not for sale) and varied, all to ask the question: what is the nature of art, and what is our relationship to it?
With the advent of social media, the way an audience consumes art has completely changed. Where does this leave spaces such as galleries and museums, which were once a marker of class – cherished, exclusive and intellectual?
It’s a question that Melbourne performance artist and choreographer Shelley Lasica is familiar with. Over almost four decades she has built an international reputation as a collaborative and interdisciplinary place-based artist whose works are developed in dialogue with fashion designers, sculptors, musicians, writers, visual artists and, uniquely, the conditions and context of the spaces that she works in.
For her new work, When I Am Not There, a co-commission by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Monash University Museum of Art (MOMA), these artistic practices are immediately evident. Across three spaces in the basement of AGNSW’s historic South Building, she has curated sculptures, video installations, soundscapes, costumes, and objects (some from her extensive list of collaborators and others from her historical archives). These elements – as outlined in a roomsheet she has provided to orient the audience – make up the “exhibition” component of a new medium she has coined “performance-exhibition”.
The performance component comes from the eight dancers that inhabit the space for the complete duration of the gallery's opening hours. For many hours across the work’s 14 days, these dancers implement Lasica’s renowned non-linear choreographic framework, which sees them use repetitious, circular storytelling to improvise, experiment and craft a narrative with the audience. There is a sense that the work is an open-ended train of thought or inquiry, still figuring out what it is, figuratively and literally. It is neither Instagrammable nor outrageous, but it is an experience.
The work is most appealing when the dancers are engaging in a movement dialogue with each other or the audience, or giving the illusion of storytelling. In these moments, their individual styles of movement become their identity and the heart of the work – connection – comes to the forefront. As an audience member, it is the spontaneity of these relational moments that makes the work engaging.
Where the work is weak is the connection between the exhibition and the performance. Despite filling a two-sided roomsheet and a comprehensive publication, the spaces feel empty, and the objects are too abstract, too few and too hidden to sell the magnificence of Lasica’s vision. There is a lot of onus put on the audience to join the dots, and a less educated audience may not have the patience. Where viral performance art videos on social media break through the ivory tower of high art, this work seems to hold up the walls of the institution it is made within.
Although its delivery is clunky, this is perhaps part of Lasica’s inquiry. By creating an ongoing, never-ending performance exhibition, she lets the audience choose how long they want to spend with the work, similar to the experience of visiting a traditional gallery space. While this does start to challenge the way live art is experienced, When I Am Not There is decidedly unpolitical and ambling. It starts to democratise the experience of performance, but does little to decolonise or even acknowledge the privilege of the space it’s in, choosing instead to reinforce the space as only for the academic and intellectual.
It is not essential that every piece of performance art provides social commentary or incites shock and outrage, but it should be memorable, should it not?
Make your way to AGNSW during this work's residence and see for yourself what memorable moments may emerge as it continues to evolve.
‘When I Am Not There’ is showing at the Art Gallery of NSW, South Building, Lower level 2, from May 22-June 4, 2023. Entry is free. Find out more here.